It's always such a relief to get the fleeces off of the sheep and this year - with the recent spells of wet and warm weather (ideal for flies) - especially so.  In fact we've ended up shearing a whole month earlier than previously.  We've taken some fleeces off ourselves but got a batch done by the shearer on Saturday.  Anxious about the weather as we've no shelter or shed for them.  
The main things - where you can when hand-shearing - is to clip along the rise in the wool. The rise is caused by the growth of new fleece and clipping through is is like shearing through butter: lovely and soft, and leaving a small amount of the new growth on the sheep.  I've tried to take a picture of the rise this year )as people often ask me what I mean) but not sure if this photo shows it well enough.  In this photo you can see bare (ish) skin, then to the right of it the new growth in the wool, with the rise just showing under last year's fleece.

Returning the lambs to their shorn mothers is chaos.  No one knows who is who, and lambs have been known to attach themselves to a shorn fleece which will smell like their mum.  Within half an hour or so though, all is quiet again, the fleeces are cleaned and rolled and stowed in the defender ready to head home for further sorting.

For a while now, I have been wanting to dye my own wool.  I have been investing in wee packets of Gaywool dyes from the Threshing Barn and plucking up the courage to get started.  I am always so inspired by the colours I see around me and ache to be able to paint - but I can't.  However, weaving comes the closest I can find to being able to paint with wool hence the Orkney scarf below, woven in my own wool plus yarn from Whistlebare in Northumberland.

Anyway, I think there was a morning when I should have been somewhere but it was cancelled, so I got started.  Used a combination of pan and microwave to get the dyes truly set, and then hung my first batch out to dry.:

What's hidden away in here is a beautifully dyed lace-weight skein, which I have kept for myself.  Will dye some more lace-weight though.

It has been a strange lambing period this time: changeable weather (some of it very good indeed) but the lambs were slow to start and on the whole it was a very stop and start effort.  Which is frustrating.  This autumn we will probably sponge the ewes again, which will be an entire blog post in its own right.  I must remember to take photos.
We have ended up with 33 lambs, (10 male and 13 female - so fewer half-hoggets for everyone to eat next autumn) and two non-lambing ewes. Everyone gets another chance on our holding.  
Our first lamb was a huge single tup which we have named Arthur - now morphed into King Arthur on account of his relative size and presence.  The name originally chosen to remind Paolo for ever of the bet he didn't place (and we are habitual Lucinda Russell-backers) on One for Arthur, the Grand National Winner born that same afternoon.  He is still growing well, has been left entire and likes having his photo taken, especially when he can show that he is nearly as big as his mum already:

We now have a couple of patterned ewes and we put these to a fawn tup, who between them have produced some very pretty patterned lambs, included one who looks as if she has had her feet and tail dipped in hot chocolate.  More photos to come.
We have decided to Heptavac the sheep from now on, which means injecting all the adults twice, and now the lambs twice too.  They don't seem to mind it so much!

I was lucky to receive a copy of the Maker's Yearbook earlier this year and it has certainly concentrated my mind about how to promote the wool more effectively.  I was lucky enough to get a last-minute stall at the St Abbs Wool Fest (now in Eyemouth) although this meant snaking a day off out of the lambing field and leaving the under-Shepherd in charge).  I did a lot of research into how to make the stall work, what other vendors wanted to pass on in the way of advice, and set a promotions budget so that I could make the stall look as professional as possible in a short period of time. First step to get this bright and cheerful pop-up banner stand made, then a trip to IKEA (the gates of the underworld) for table-cloth, fairly lights and baskets in which to display my wool.  Also what seemed like an eternity of printing and sticking on labels to each ball of wool, ordering cards and postcards.  Finally remembering to organise a cash float and get myself a card-reader!  Finally though, I arrived at the venue; everyone was really kind and helpful and I managed to get the stall set up to look like this!

  What a proud moment that was!  
​Great things about the wool fair were:
- the other friendly stall holders
- the great range of classes available (which I really wanted to attend) especially the felted fishy class!
- the huge number of really interested and enthusiastic customers who arrived as the door opened and didn't stop coming until the end
- the great refreshment service which kept me supplied at the stall with copious amounts of tea all day
and of course the Giacopazzi's icecream at the harbour before I headed home.  Enormous credit to Jenny Howe who organises this event. It's superb!
Next St Abbs Wool Fest is 4th November 2017.  Excited already!

Haven't written for a while so am writing and dating these to reflect what's been going on over the Spring!  The sheep are getting very close to lambing now - predicted start date was 28th March - and we need to feed them more over the last six weeks as this is when most foetal development takes place.  Weather has been mixed including snow and hot sunshine!  Spent a beautiful week in the Northern Dales and finally started on my Moorland Ripple Blanket by Attic24 .  I love her work!  Progress has been slow but the colours are great and the blanket currently looks more like this:

Came back and went along the next day to Edinburgh YarnFest at the Corn Exchange.    
This event describes itself as the UK's premier urban knitting event and it is huuuuge!  I owe the organisers of this event so much for all the love and support they've shown me over the last year or so:  believing in the idea of LammermuirWool before I did!  I tried very hard to restrain myself from buying anything (too much) but it is always good to catch up with friends who run stalls at this event, particularly Amanda Perkins Crochet Blankets,  John Arbon (both because - as we all know - Lynton rocks), Ange at WeftBlown, the ladies from Whistlebare who modeled my Orkney Scarf, woven in their lovely wool, Jenny at SkyBluePink, and Ronnie Eunson from Uradale Yarns.  It's exhausting though - all that looking at wool and feeling inspired, by just how creative people are - so didn't stay all day and went home very proud of my stash (pictured below). As you can see, there are quite a few books there; and they don't count.  Do they?:

Tupping time is a crucial part of the year, and decisions about which tups to use on which ewes develop over the course of the preceding months.  The old saying is that 'the tup is half your flock', meaning that it is responsible for half the genetic make-up of next year's lambs!
This means that in choosing a tup, you need to look at the sheep that you have, and identify what traits you need to breed in to your flock.  As there is a breed standard for shetlands, there are lots of clear pointers of things that you do want in your flock and thus also things that you don't!  It is rare for one tup to be able to bring you all the breed traits that you need, but that is the golden grail of tup-hunting, buying, breeding and hiring: the perfect tup with an amenable personality, the correct conformation, fantastic wool ....
We breed colour to colour which means dividing the ewes into small groups with a tup allocated to each group: white tup to white ewes; black tup to black ewes, moorit tup to moorit ewes (or vice-versa as we took the ewes to visit a spendid island moorit ram on a neighbour's farm), grey tup to grey ewes (as above), and fawn tup across all the patterned ewes. And in amongst all this complication, you need to avoid any of the breeding sheep being too closely related.
The tups came out yesterday and went back to their winter grazing, where their male friends greeted them with hostility and rampant desire.  These few breeding tups smell of lady-sheep and so we needed to pen ALL the males very tightly until they ALL smell equally of lady-sheep.  Job done for another year.  Now just to get ready for the winter feeding regime.

Haven't posted since the end of the summer so thought I would do a couple of pieces as an autumn catch up on all things sheep-related.
The end of the summer is traditionally the time when sheep sales for breeding sheep and tups happens in earnest.  We attended two official shetland sheep society sales: one at :Laanark and one at Melton Mowbray.As always, we were spoilt for choice with some fantastic sheep for sale.
As we have been trying to DOWNSIZE the flock for a few years now, it is hard to justify buying more sheep but ... we did end the sale season with two additionas to the flock:
Galtress Squishy (shown left, above) and Muncaster Gwen who is a sweet black sheep with a white krunet head and white socks.
We have sold a LOT of sheep this year, but have been able to travel the country and meet lovely new buyers who are just starting out on the Shetland Sheep journey!
There's always a wee gap between sales and tupping, so we had a great break away in Kingairloch, where I was able to visit a starter flock I had sold a couple of years ago.  The sheep are now all living at Sanna on Ardnamurchan (above), and seem very very happy indeed with their new seaside lives.
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The lambs are growing very well indeed this year and the ones born early have become boisterous young thugs who will chew our wellies, unzip our jackets and eat our hair given the chance.  The picture above shows Birgitta's first ever ewe lamb, a stunning katmoget. Birgitta is the ewe who is getting her annual haircut in the video we've uploaded to our website, and was the first lamb born on this holding.
The fleeces are all away to the Mill in Yorkshire, and we are just deciding what types of yarn to get them all spun in to.  Lanark Show and Sale is coming up at the end of August, which means that we only have a few days left to decide which (if any) of our beloved sheep to sell on to other breeders via the market.  Sorting through the sheep for the sale is always a bit sad, but also quite rewarding as we can see how the flock has improved over the previous year, and look at the positive traits which we are slowly trying to embed nto the flock as a whole.

The Royal Highland Show is a highlight of our sheepy year, and a chance to see the very best Shetland sheep on the mainland.  Things were a bit changed this year with the sheep pens laid out differently and the judging taking place slightly later on the Friday afternoon.
The judge was Eric Graham, a breeder from Shetland who took his time judging the sheep and awarded the prizes to a number of 'new' faces who definitely deserved them!
As well as the competitive side of things, the show is a great chance to catch up with other Scottish breeders as we don't all get together that much. and we took time to chill out in the sunshine after the ram inspections on Sunday morning.  I shall write more about ram inspections another time.

I managed to get time to see just a fraction of the rest of the show, but made the effort to visit the 3D2D craft tent to visit Weft Blown's stall and introduce my other half to Ange the weaving-teacher.  Didn't spend much money this year but bought another pair of Jakoti shears and something to clean grass and scour stains: we need to prepare the sheep for Haddington Show!
The shearer has been and sheared half of the flock and I've added a new page which includes a short film of Fraser at work on our grey katmoget ewe, Birgitta.
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Since I had time to post much but lambing has just finished and, as always, it was a stressful time in that you never know what to expect and have to be prepared for all sorts of challenges.  These hardy primitive sheep lamb themselves (by and large) outside and we then move mother and lamb(s) to a roughly made shelter for up to 48 hours to ensure bonding is strong.  Time spent hanging around at the pens is rewarded with the sounds of woodpeckers, peewits, oystercatchers and both tawny and barn owls.  The lambs become independent very quickly and part of our checking routine now seems aimed at preventing lambs from getting lost, getting stuck and generally getting into bother.  Lambs love to explore and will get through the smallest gap in fences.  The lambs are growing very quickly indeed these days.
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The retired ladies and last year’s ewe lambs (now known as ewe hoggs) are kept separate to avoid any mis-mothering.  They have moved to a nearby plot for the summer months where they will be made a big fuss of by workers and staff at the local whisky distillery.
The tups are starting to grow again now that the grass has arrived and are fighting each other with their growing horns.
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Lambing starts in three weeks.  The ewes are increasingly hungry but the grass hasn't started growing yet.  The weather has been crisp and cold with frosty mornings, snow flurries and occasional views of the Northern Lights.
Over the coming couple of weeks, we will erect the outdoor lambing pens (we have no shed or barn) and let the ewes into the lambing field, where they can pick out their 'lambing spots' well ahead of time.  The more experienced ewes pick out better, more sheltered spots in the field.  I'll post a picture of the lambing pens once they're up, but they are usually a miracle of fence-posts, pallets, hurdles and sheets of corrugated iron.  Each year we marvel that they have stayed up!
On the weaving front, I have completed a fine woven shawl in the moorit and the white two-ply wool - two panels which incorporated some pink and some 'bling' thread, hemmed and sewn together with my rudimentary machine sewing skills.  It is being posted to Italy today as it's a birthday gift for my mother-in-law.
I also made my favourite scarf yet - again destined to be a birthday gift for someone else. My sister this time.  
On the website front, I've had a go at improving the Search Engine Optimisation bit of the site, but not at all sure I've cracked this.  It's all new to me.
The cone above has been my best-selling item.  It contains 800-1000 grammes of double-knit, undyed Shetland wool in black, moorit and grey.  It's beautiful!
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 This week brought more snow, ice, then  biting winds causing some drifting of snow followed by a rapid melting.  We solved our hay shortage thanks to a delivery of 50 more bales which should see us through past lambing.  The in-lamb ewes are 'bigging -up' (but not bagging up) and have found a new place to shelter from the weather. They always appear at feeding time though!
Sad news that Gail, one of my founding flock, died this week- I had sold her with a handful of other sheep to an old friend in the Yorkshire Pennines who wanted sheep to graze a small paddock. Julia has thrown herself into keeping sheep 100% and I know that Gail will have been much loved and petted in her final couple of years. Shetland sheep live a good long time though. Of my original 6, four are still alive (two with me) with my two just having 'retired from the duties of lamb-rearing).
As part of my birthday present, P bought me a p;ace on a ''next steps' weaving course in West Kilbride at Weft Blown  http://www.weftblown.com/  I can't recommend this place highly enough.  Ange, the owner, is a knowledgeable and patient teacher who has to put up with my fuzzy brain and inability to get even the most simple things right..  Ange also makes the most stunning hand-woven items for sale, and will be at Edinburgh YarnFest in March. The end-result of my day is shown in the picture above.  Glad to get back to the relative simplicity of the 90th-birthday-shawl I am currently working on to a rapidly-approaching deadline.
The new website is still generating orders for wool, and there are not many of the variegated cones left.  And I still need to work out how to put fancy words linked to the site that will mean people can find it on the internet.  A big thanks to everyone who has ordered wool so far.  
Lots of consultancy work next week, along with the funeral of an old friend, but time to give some serious thoughts about which sheep I can sell as there's a potential buyer coming to visit soon.  
​Have a good week everyone.

The weather has been odd this week.  Crisp sunshine mixed in with snowy showers and some frosty mornings.  We missed Storm Imogen, despite having sat in the way of all of the other named storms so far.
We ran out of hay this week.  We always run out just at this time (because we don't have enough barn space to store more bales) just at the point when everyone else who has hay is scratching their heads, counting their stock of bales, and hoping it will last.  Met a really nice local small-holder who keeps Gotlands and I shall be seeing if I can get some of the wool to sell next time they have some.  Hay panic over - we have 50 more bales coming next week plus Andy-the-Gotland-man let us have twenty to be going on with.
Liver fluke has been a big worry amongst farmers this winter, due to the wet late summer, autumn and winter. We've had two sheep die of liver fluke in previous years, and it is distressing for sheep and shepherd alike. We dosed all of the sheep against it in the autumn and did them all again a few weeks ago.  Fingers crossed.
A poorly shoulder has put paid to any knitting or crochet this last fortnight.  Two visits to a nearby horse-osteopath has me feeling tons better, but I shall stick to spinning and weaving for a while.  The picture above shows some skeins I've spun from bought-in carded and dyed rovings.  The grey one is undyed.  Felt better enough to do some great local walks this week - both up at the Hopes, a couple of miles away.
The website has been hard work but that has mostly been down to my inability to input weights into the shipping section properly.  Those very nice people at Weebly got back to me within 24 hours explaining what I had done wrong.  I think it's fixed now  (fingers crossed).
My wool is also now on sale at Humbie Hub.  Big thanks to them for putting it on display!  .

It was a trip to the Big DeStash in Edinburgh which set up the momentum for this website. I have been selling wool for a couple of years now. I tried Etsy and had no (zero) sales. I have been selling on Ebay for some time but the profit margin is tiny and probably doesn't cover my diesel to the local post office in Humbie.
I took a table at the Big DeStash (is that not a fabulous idea?) and met some people who seemed genuinely blown away by what I was selling. What they loved most of all was that the wool was traceable and local(ish) and their first question - and I would be the same - was 'can I buy this online?'
I was embarrassed to have to say no and got some great advice on how to get started.
The new website has two main purposes: to inform people about my Shetland sheep and what it's like to keep them and produce wool from them, and to provide an online shop for my wool.
If this works out okay, then I would like to expand into selling wool for other local producers (perhaps other breeds as well as Shetland wool).
The website also has a contact page and a log/in register page. My plan is to send out the blog as an email to contacts so I'll need to work out how to do that.... In the meantime, have a peaceful time of it.
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